How Jeanne Shaheen plans to dismantle Scott Brown in New Hampshire

Brown faces a double-digit polling deficit to Shaheen. | AP Photos

Shaheen’s problem is that she’s backed her party on every major issue. Republicans cite a statistic that Shaheen voted with Obama 99 percent of the time last year. Shaheen clearly recognizes what’s coming: An internal poll that her campaign conducted last week tried to gauge how effective that line of attack will be.

“What I’m trying to do is to do what’s best for New Hampshire,” she said in a brief interview at a restored mill in rural New Hampshire. “When that’s been what the president has agreed to, then that’s what I’ve been supported. When it’s been different, then I’ve voted differently.”

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She expresses no regrets about voting for the Affordable Care Act, but also tells anyone who asks that she was “the first person” to call on Obama to extend the enrollment date and has pitched legislation to ensure people can get access to state hospitals not currently covered by the federal plans.

Republicans say there’s no escaping the law. “Her constituent service has been very strong, she works hard and is a fine person, but this election is going to be a referendum on the failed rollout of Obamacare,” said Steve Duprey, the state’s Republican national committeeman.

During a 2008 debate, Shaheen struggled to identify a national issue where she opposed her party’s leadership. Posed the same question during the interview last week, she cited her opposition to the TARP bailout and an Internet sales tax.

Yet her opposition to the bank bailout came after careful calibration: During the 2008 race, Shaheen declined to take a position until Congress approved it. Then she attacked Sununu for voting yes.

Shaheen has signaled she’ll try to emphasize unobjectionable initiatives with cross-party appeal. During the most recent Senate recess, she spoke at a dinner for adoptive families, discussed her work for veterans at a lunch with former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and hosted a forum for seniors to learn about avoiding fraud.

The Warren playbook

She’s also looking to run up her advantage among women. The Suffolk/Herald survey showed Shaheen up 20 points among women. And the 2014 Democratic ticket in New Hampshire is led by women: the senator, the governor and both House members. Republicans will nominate men for three, and potentially four, of those offices.

Shaheen will also not-so-subtly highlight her status as a shatterer of glass ceilings. She hosted a roundtable earlier this month to talk about her push to increase the number of women business owners.

It’s lost on no one that Brown’s two opponents for Massachusetts Senate – Martha Coakley in 2010, and Elizabeth Warren in 2012 – were female. Shaheen said she’s in regular touch with her neighbor-state senator Warren, but declined to go any further.

She cautioned, however, that there’s only so much to draw from Warren’s 8-point victory over Brown. It was a presidential year, and Massachusetts is a very different state. Shaheen also demurred when asked if she’d want the liberal icon to campaign for her.

“New Hampshire is different than Massachusetts,” she said. “We have, well, we’re the live free or die state. We are independent.”

Still, it’s a good bet that Shaheen’s allies will go after Brown on women’s issues. Warren ran ads attacking Brown for voting against the Paycheck Fairness Act, supporting the Blunt Amendment that would have allowed employers to deny contraception coverage for religious reasons and opposing Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination.

On abortion, however, Brown called himself “pro-choice” in 2012 campaign ads, and that could help him counter Shaheen’s anti-women argument.

‘Some of the nastiest campaigns’

It’s no surprise to those who know Shaheen that her first ad attacks Brown for declining to sign the so-called “People’s Pledge” to limit outside spending in the race.

Back in 1998, cruising to a second term as governor with a 35-point margin of victory, she continued to unload on her Republican opponent with negative ads through the final days of the race. As he hit her for refusing to terminate an adviser accused of drunk driving, Shaheen slammed him as “reckless” and warned of massive property tax increases if he won.

“There’s a heavy tendency to negative campaigning,” said University of New Hampshire pollster Andy Smith. “They run some of the nastiest campaigns you’ll ever see.”

The weekend that Brown started his “listening tour,” Shaheen’s campaign went into the field with a poll to test lines of attack against Brown. Ironically, one of the voters they reached was James Sununu, brother of former Shaheen opponent John Sununu. He wrote down the 20 minutes worth of questions and shared them with POLITICO.

The pollster asked about the tea party, Republicans in Congress and the Koch Brothers. Another question was about whether he would be less likely to vote for Brown knowing that he was backed by Wall Street and big banks, and received money from energy companies before and after voting to protect their tax breaks.

Shaheen is already rolling out these lines on the trail.

“What we saw in his time in Washington was that he was an apologist for Wall Street, took hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street,” she told reporters after an event in Concord. “He was an apologist for the oil and gas industry; he took hundreds of thousands of dollars from them.”

Brown believes that he can connect one-on-one with more voters in a smaller state like New Hampshire, blunting those attacks.

“People don’t really know her record,” he said after a recent tour of a metal fabrication shop in Hudson, N.H. “They want somebody, like hopefully me, to go down there and bridge that gap, to be that bridge in the middle.”